Matthew Vitz. A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. Radical Perspectives Series. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Illustrations, maps. 352 pp. $104.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-7029-1; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-7040-6.
Reviewed by John R. McNeill (Georgetown University)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2018)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Before Mexico City was beset by pollution from vehicle tailpipes it was beleaguered by seasonal dust storms and floods. From the human point of view, the basin of Mexico has many charms, making it all the more tempting to try to rectify its environmental imperfections. People have attempted rectifications on modest scales for several millennia. In particular, water often seemed to be in the wrong place or the wrong quantity at the wrong time, inspiring long-standing ambitions to reconfigure the plumbing of the basin, which has no natural outflow. With the rise of bacteriology after 1880, available water also increasingly seemed to be of unsatisfactory quality. The decades between 1890 and 1950 witnessed a surge of efforts to improve upon nature, specifically water, in the basin of Mexico.
The environmental history of Mexico City is a compelling subject. Matthew Vitz gives us a new slice of it here, making contributions to the history of Mexico, Mexico City, and urban Latin America. His study illuminates conflicting visions of urban regional planning and political contests over access to land, wood, and above all water, in the basin of Mexico from the late Porfiriato through the 1940s. His conclusion is that a technocratic, top-down, vision won out over all alternatives.
The book’s structure is broadly chronological. It begins with a critique of modernizing plans of the Porfiriato’s scientific elite, deemed racist by Vitz for their disdain of indigenous practices of forest, lake, and marsh use. The chief protagonists here, and throughout much of the book, are urban planners and hydrological and forest engineers, notably Roberto Gayol and Miguel Ángel de Quevedo. The Mexican Revolution saw rival visions of how best to manage the basin’s waters and forests associated with the leanings and ideologies of Francisco Madero, Victoriano Huerta, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, and others among the revolution’s warlords. The chaos of the revolutionary years made it hard for anyone to execute any of the several plans concocted. After the revolution, generous promises to the downtrodden created popular expectations of clean and copious water that no one in power managed to meet. The meat of the book concerns the Lázaro Cárdenas years. Vitz goes into greater detail here on forests, following Chris Boyer (Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico [2015]) and Emily Wakild (Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico’s National Parks, 1910-1940, [2011]), and on land distribution, without losing sight of the water question. As in so many histories, Cárdenas appears almost as a tragic hero, unable in the end to deliver on but a modicum of the hopes he raised. After 1938, he too acquiesced in technocratic, top-down management of the basin’s water, failing to enact plans that might have suited the poor better. The final chapters concern the consolidation of the technocratic, politically conservative approach to regional planning in the 1940s. Vitz has a kind word, however, for the “city’s most recent architects, engineers, and planners” who are “well-meaning” (p. 234). I imagine historians a century from now will be no kinder to them than Vitz is to those of the Porfiriato.
Vitz anchors his work in Mexican archives and provides a freshet of details on specific communities, their interests and internal conflicts, as well as on plans and planners. He has also read broadly in urban environmental history, and seems especially influenced by Marty V. Melosi’s work on urban sanitation (The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present [2000]) and William Cronon’s insistence that city and hinterland be understood as a unit (Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West [1991]). Vitz makes many passing references to water management history elsewhere around the world, following his Mexican engineers, who took a keen interest in sewerage, drainage, and planning in Europe, the US, and parts of the colonial world, such as India. So while the book is intensely local, Vitz leavens that perspective from time to time, albeit fleetingly.
The book will interest Mexicanists and Latin Americanist urban historians above others. Vitz does a fine job summarizing the politics of the Porfiriato, the revolution, and Cardenismo for the uninitiated, but he assumes a formidable knowledge of the location of villages and urban neighborhoods that few but specialists will have. Explaining the whereabouts of the Huexocoapa marsh as bordering Santa María Nativitas is no help to those of us who could not place either one (p. 145). The maps provided only indicate a small fraction of the place names deployed in the text. The level of detail on plans that went nowhere, but may nonetheless indicate something about prevailing ideas and political culture in Mexico, will likely exceed the curiosity of all but Mexicanists. The realization of plans to build sewer networks and partial realization of plans to drain the basin’s lakes draw less attention than planning, so nonspecialist readers will often wonder how much of Lake Texcoco was left or what proportion of Mexico City residents had sewerage at this or that point in the story. The material realities of hydraulic infrastructure—which Mexicanists probably do not need to be reminded of—often take a back seat to analysis of the political machinations behind planning. So while Vitz has gone further than most dissertation books go to reach audiences beyond those concerned with his particular time and place, he has not gone far enough for my (nonspecialist) taste.
One direction I hoped to see Vitz follow is the history of waterborne disease in Mexico City. Early in the book he quotes various late nineteenth-century observers on the health hazards presented by the shrinking waters of Lake Texcoco and its associated canals. The drive to drain stagnant waters and install sewerage derived in no small part from concern over the toll (or potential toll) from typhoid, cholera, and dozens of other waterborne diseases, which before 1880 were the main reason why most cities around the world were sinkholes for humanity with death rates higher than birth rates. But the public health consequences of the changes to the basin’s hydrology scarcely figure in Vitz’s study. While his concern is first and foremost politics, it seems (to me at least) that the political success or failure of one or another direction in regional planning and water management would in considerable measure derive from its public health consequences. I would have liked to know if the re-engineering of the basin’s waters actually led to reduced rates of waterborne disease, as much of it was at least ostensibly intended to do.
For Mexicanists, political historians, urban historians, and historians of planning, I suspect, Vitz’s emphasis on the politics of planning and what it reveals about the Porfiriato, the revolution, and the Cárdenas years will be well placed. Only churlish non-Mexicanist environmental historians, like myself, would ask for something else.
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Citation:
John R. McNeill. Review of Vitz, Matthew, A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52146
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